Logistically the title is a book designer’s dream, because its unique four characters so easily adapt it to a very strong, iconic treatment . . .

Upon reading the manuscript, it soon occurred to me that the duality of Aomame’s situation could be represented by an interaction of the book’s jacket with the binding/cover underneath. By using a semi-transparent vellum for the jacket, and printing the woman’s image in a positive/negative scheme with the title on the outside layer and the rest of her on the binding, once the jacket is wrapped around the book it ‘completes’ the picture of her face.

If you head on over to the Knopf blog, they have images where you can see exactly what Kidd means.

If you’re one of the Murakami people out there, Amazon now lists 1Q84 for Oct 25 (though sans cover).

The page count is 928, compared to 1662 for the Japanese trilogy, so looks like this is only volumes 1 and 2, as I suspected.

It’ll be interesting to see how this one stacks up. Murakami can do some interesting stuff when he’s on, but pretty much everything since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has been bland. Hope this one is good!